It was not unnatural that the aged statesman's thoughts should revert in this supreme moment to the heroic scenes in which he had been an actor almost a half-century before. He could not but think with bitterness of those long past but never forgotten days when he, with other patriotic youths, had faced the terrible legions of Alva in defence of the Fatherland, at a time when the men who were now dooming him to a traitor's death were unborn, and who, but for his labours, courage, wisdom, and sacrifices, might have never had a Fatherland to serve, or a judgment-seat on which to pronounce his condemnation. Not in a spirit of fretfulness, but with disdainful calm, he criticised and censured the proceedings against himself as a violation of the laws of the land and of the first principles of justice, discussing them as lucidly and steadily as if they had been against a third person. The preachers listened, but had nothing to say. They knew not of such matters, they said, and had no instructions to speak of them. They had been sent to call him to repentance for his open and hidden sins and to offer the consolations of religion. "I know that very well," he said, "but I too have something to say notwithstanding." The conversation then turned upon religious topics, and the preachers spoke of predestination. "I have never been able to believe in the matter of high predestination," said the Advocate. "I have left it in the hands of God the Lord. I hold that a good Christian man must believe that he through God's grace and by the expiation of his sin through our Redeemer Jesus Christ is predestined to be saved, and that this belief in his salvation, founded alone on God's grace and the merits of our Redeemer Jesus Christ, comes to him through the same grace of God. And if he falls into great sins, his firm hope and confidence must be that the Lord God will not allow him to continue in them, but that, through prayer for grace and repentance, he will be converted from evil and remain in the faith to the end of his life." These feelings, he said, he had expressed fifty-two years before to three eminent professors of theology in whom he confided, and they had assured him that he might tranquilly continue in such belief without examining further. "And this has always been my creed," he said. The preachers replied that faith is a gift of God and not given to all men, that it must be given out of heaven to a man before he could be saved. Hereupon they began to dispute, and the Advocate spoke so earnestly and well that the clergymen were astonished and sat for a time listening to him in silence. He asked afterwards about the Synod, and was informed that its decrees had not yet been promulgated, but that the Remonstrants had been condemned.